How hard is it to make WMD

I have heard with nuclear weapons its not very hard to make them, as long as you have the fissionable material. Can a few people with some experience in engineering and nuclear physics make one as long as they have the raw materials? Can someone with microbiology or chemistry experience (an undergrad or a graduate degree) make biological or chemical weapons or is the process too involved and involving too much expensive, hard to get machinery for stateless terrorists to accomplish it? ie, is it lack of expertise or lack of raw materials and the machinery necessary to manufacture the final product that is lacking?

In case people get the wrong idea, I am wondering is it lack of knowledge and training (which seems easy to fix) or lack of access to the machinery and technology that prevents terrorists from making WMD. I know with nuclear weapons it is the lack of fissionable materials but what about chem or bio weapons.

I’m going off the top of my head here, to avoid having links that may be construed as a “DIY WMD guide”.

Making nuclear weapons involves more than having the material and the physics knowhow, you also need some specialized technology as well.
For example, you end up with some U-235 or whatever, and you intend to make a fission weapon, which is easier to make than a fusion weapon.
The physics of how to make a fission weapon are well known, you could make one similar to the US “Fat Man” or “Little Boy” weapons, but the problem would be getting certain parts of the system used to actually detonate the weapon.
One of the key components of a fission type weapon are the fuses that detonate the explosive shell around the “pit” (as its’ called), these are not run of the mill blasting fuses, but a special type of fuse used only in nuclear weapons. There are also certain switches and capacitors and whatnot that are only used for this purpose, so trying to find or purchase them would be hard to do.

Plus, one you’ve built a nuclear weapon from scratch and on the sly, do you hope it will work the first time or do you test fire first?

Chemical weapons are probably the easiest and cheapest to manufacture, since several industrial chemicals make nice WMD’s on their own, but storage and transport can be a problem, especially if you’re manufacturing them a good distance away from your target.

Biological weapons can be produced using equipment designed to make vaccines for the bacteria/virus, you basically run the process in reverse. Saddam Hussein was rumored to have an anthrax production facility that had the “official” purpose of making anthrax vaccinations for cattle, to make a vaccine, you need a live version of the critter you’re trying to vaccinate against.

To answer your question, it could be a lack of both, it depends on what the group has v/s what they need. My guess would be the groups have some or all of the knowledge needed, depending on the weapon system, but lack the equipment to manufacture, store, or transport that weapon.

Making war gases such as chlorine or phosgene is very simple and any chemist could probably think of a dozen ways to do it. A nerve agent is a lot more difficult but is still doable in small quantities. One major problem of storing these things. Nerve agents are unstable and quickly degrade into relatively non-toxic components while chlorine is extremely reactive and will attack many kinds of containers.

Culturing a pathogen such as anthrax or plague can also be done by a few trained people. After culturing and refining a pathogen, someone would technically have a bio weapon. I believe that most of the difficulty is in breeding your bug to resist antibiotics and ultraviolet light and in making it as contagious as possible. Delivery is also tough. Whatever you manufacture has to be an airborne contagion which requires that very few particles cause the disease. Biological weapons are a lot more difficult to manufacture in militarily significant quantities and a lot more difficult to deliver as well.

I hope this was helpful. FTR, I’m not a chemist or a biologist but studied this pretty intensively during the first Gulf war as I was living in Al-Khobar.

Regards

Testy

Not exactly. You also need to weaponize the virus – that is, convert it to some form that is likely to cause damage. This typically involves converting the virus or bacteria culture to a dry, white powder, which can be difficult – especially since excessive dryness can kill the pathogen in question.

In the case of anthrax, the powder must be ground to just the right grain size, to make it effective. If the grains are too large, the powder won’t be inhaled, whiuch limits its effectiveness If the grains are too small, it will be inhaled, and then exhaled right out again.

Additionally, one must also defeat the static charges that can make the powder grains adhere to each other. This is not difficult in principle, but it is a serious technical challenge.

The bottom line is that weaponizing a virus is not a smple process at all.

I won’t go into details, but there’s probably hundreds of folk working in biomedical research labs across the country that have access to the materials and possess the skills to create bioweapons. I have these skills, and while in grad school, I had access to human-infectable viral vectors that with a modicum of effort could be engineered into something nasty (as it was, there was enough concern that we might be inadvertantly creating something with this potential that precautions were taken). As JThunder and Testy point out, the real problem is effective delivery of the bioweapon.

You’re right about weaponzing the biological agent, I was focusing more on the actual production of the agent.
I think this helps to show Wesley Clark that knowledge of WMD’s is one thing, but production another matter.

At one point it, was said that the anthrax used in the post-9-11 anthax attacks could’ve been made in someone’s garage with a few thousand dollars.

Knowledge-wise…?

Going back to nukes… there are all sorts of materials and technical parts necessary beside fissionable material to make a good bomb. You might end up with a dud…

Yeah but it was my understanding that only the fissionable material was hard to get ahold of. Wasn’t the little boy nuke just a tube with fissionable material and TNT in it?

Are you asking about nukes or WMD in general?

Tim McVeigh came up with a pretty good one with ingredients still widely available.

Apologies for the lack of a concrete cite, but I remember reading an article a few years ago where a couple of university lecturers were asked (I think by the US or UK government) to sit down and design a nuclear device.

All they were allowed to use were published books and articles, and online sources.

My recall is a bit hazy, but the report concluded that if you were to bring together a university-educated physicist, mathemetician and engineer you could produce a reasonably effective nuclear device from information commonly available through books and online sources (assuming access to material and standard engineering equipment).

If your fissionable material is U235, then it is techically trivial to make a gun-type nuke out of it. Little Boy was indeed a tube (actually an artillery gun barrel), a U235 target, a U235 projectile and a propellant charge (more likely to be a smokeless powder such as cordite rather than TNT, but I don’t know the specifics.) Little Boy did contain neutron generators but it would have worked without them.

If your fissionable material is P239 then the gun-type design isn’t viable - the thing will fizzle. You need an implosion design using shaped explosives, two speeds of explosive to focus the detonation wave, precisely synchronised detonation, and precisely synchronised neutron generation. This is technically difficult and probably beyond the capabilities of terrorist organisations, but not hostile nations.

Chlorine gas can be made with household cleaners. I don’t know if this will be powerful enough for military or terrorist purposes, and I have never thought or researched about a delivery system.

And yes, that bucket of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in my garage could concievably be used to make a bomb, and that can of hornet spray is nerve agent. I suppose the average homeowner’s garage, laundry and under the kitchen sink could be called a chemical weapons lab.

The first of those attacks was very crude. It could conceivably have been a homemade effort. Of course, it was also clumsy and ineffective.

I’m not sure how much effort went into the second of those attacks, but it was decidedly more sophisticated.

Not exactly fizzle. It’ll have a low yield, but it will still explode. Plus it will shower bits of un-fissioned plutonium everywhere. That might be an acceptable result for a terrorist. The headlines would read “Terrorists detonate dirty nuke”.

I’m curious about this. Do you have some info indicating two different types of attack? We’re talking about the letters sent to Senator Daschle and others around October 15, 2001, right? Was that the first or the second attack?

Well, fizzle is comparative! It depends how fast your gun assembly puts the bits together - how much of a supercriticality you get before the thing blows itself apart. A really bad design could release just enough energy to interrupt the insertion and leave the bomb sub-critical - in the firecracker-grenade range. Point taken about the “dirty nuke” though.

tim McVeigh didn’t make a WMD, he made a large bomb. If you want to term that as a WMD, the the bush Administration has been dropping them on Iraq and Afghanistan.

How about a fuel-air explosive? I have read that one of these is the next best thing to a nuke and the materials are certainly available.

Testy